Bad news - the Democrats’ health reform bill (or as I’d rather call it, their health socialism bill) passed a Senate committee, becoming just one little step closer to passing.
As I explained yesterday, I’m opposed to government-funded health services and extremely opposed to insurance mandates, but there’s another part of the Senate bill that a lot of conservatives don’t mind and that has received relatively little attention, but that I think is anti-liberty and should be fought: the policy of basing insurance prices on how people live their lives.
This Globe article mentions a few examples: EMC gives a 12% health insurancce discount to employees who take a “health risk assessment.” Safeway gives a discount to employees who quit smoking, lose weight, or engage in other healthy behaviors. Right now, companies are only allowed to give a 20% discount for such things, but under the Senate bill that would be increased to 30%, or maybe even 50%.
The article describes such policies as “a potential breakthrough on one of the most controversial elements of healthcare overhaul: how to get Americans to improve their well-being without turning government into a medical version of Big Brother.”
This sums up the crux of the debate between those who believe people need to be protected from themselves, and those who believe in liberty. In my opinion, there is no way to get people to improve their well-being without violating their liberty and becoming Big Brother. Attempting to control what people do is by necessity incompatible with freedom.
For employers to give discounts to people who do things that are considered healthy is equivalent to penalizing people who do things that are considered unhealthy. This is wrong. Employers should have no say over what people do in their private lives outside of work. All that your employer should care about is how you do your job. For this reason, it doesn’t make sense for employers to offer health insurance. Why should your employer care whether you have health insurance or not? Health insurance, if it exists at all, should be a product just like any other, and people should get to decide in the free market whether they want to buy it. Employers are really overstepping their bounds by using prices to control how much people weigh, whether they smoke, what they eat, and how they spend their leisure time. These things are simply none of their business!
In fact, having health insurance at all, even if it is purchased on the free market, creates incentives for people to control each other’s behavior. How you live your life can affect how many health services you need, which, if you have health insurance, affects how much the insurance company pays and therefore how much everybody else pays for their insurance. In this way, your insurance company and fellow customers have an inventive to control what you do, which violates your liberty.
Health insurance, whether paid for by the government, employers, or consumers, creates bad incentives. That’s why I think that ideally, there should be no insurance and people should just pay for each health service they receive. Price ceilings could be implemented to stop prices from being ridiculously high, as they are now. If insurance must exist, then there need to be strict laws that prevent companies from trying to influence people’s behavior, whether through price discrimination, literature, phone calls, or other types of propaganda.
I agree with Obama and the Democrats that the health system needs to be reformed, but I disagree completely about what types of reforms should be implemented. What Americans need is liberty – the ability to make our own decisions without others trying to control our lives.
